Automated Wordpress

With over two billion websites on the internet, you might worry about how people are going to find you, and if you already have good rankings, you might worry about losing them if you were to change your website to a WordPress content management system.

If you need an easy platform that’ll allow you to rank high and drive more traffic, consider a WordPress website. WordPress websites are popular due to the ease of use, excellent functionality, and professional looks. If you’d like to see examples, check out these different WordPress sites: WordPress. org/showcase/archives. These showcase how popular and versatile the software platform is, and its search-ability and large-scale usability. If National Geographic and The Wall Street Journal have chosen WordPress, that speaks volumes about using it as a possible platform for your site.

If you’re still thinking of WordPress as a personal blog, you should know that it has evolved into much more:
Its an excellent tool for small or medium sized websites A host for galleries of videos and photos A host for forums and online communities Corporate portals And of course blog posts as well Most bloggers are familiar with the convenience and usability of WordPress, which makes it a logical choice for using as your main website too. If you are already used to blogging with WordPress, imagine how much easier maintaining your own site pages will be. So we know WordPress is easy to navigate around, easy to administer and maintain, and very versatile. The question is whether WordPress is actually SEO-friendly as well. Converting your website into WordPress could be scary if the software wiped out your hard-won search rankings.

In our experience at Boomtown Internet Group, WordPress is an great solution for the websites of smaller businesses. It can be set up quickly, easily publish content, and rapidly optimized to show up in Google’s search results. Every page can be found and indexed by Google, which sometimes doesn’t happen in other more traditional CMS (content management) systems. WordPress has many plugins and applications that make it easy for internal optimization, allowing you to build a website that features an attractive design, great functionality, and one that can easily be customized and manage-not to mention it’s SEO-friendly.

So How SEO-friendly is WordPress? Here are some tips and tricks for getting the most out of your WordPress website.

Content. If possible, design your WordPress style sheet to have your content close to the top of the page for better and easier readability-most search engines only scan the first half of web pages. WordPress can also keep sidebars, footers, and other page elements conveniently towards the bottom and out of the way. This design will allow your visitors easy readability as well.

The All-In-One SEO Plugin. The WordPress default installation doesn’t allow for strict control of page titles and meta tags for keywords and page descriptions-but there is a really great plugin called The All-In-One-SEO Plugin that does just that. For more control, it lets you add page titles and meta tags manually, as that ensures the best results. Don’t forget to optimize with regional spelling and supply the search engines with specific information for the best results.

Links. Even if you have great content, you still need great links. The quality and quantity of your links play a role in search engine favoritism. Who is linking to you? WordPress makes this easy, with trackbacks, pingbacks, and blogrolls. You’ll know who’s linking to you and you’ll easily be able to link to other people, giving both of you search engine credit. Install the “Related Posts plugin” and have your articles link to other similar articles you’ve written.

Image Optimization. Not only text can be optimized for the Search Engines:WordPress allows you to optimize your images as well. Taking the time to write alt tags and carefully name your files will drive additional traffic to your site. It’s important to take advantage of image optimization-even if your visitors can’t see your image tags, you’ll still receive traffic from different engines. It’s recommended that you take the time to do this yourself, but if you don’t have the time, use one of the available WordPress plugins to do it for you. The plugin is called “SEO friendly Images” and can add titles to images.

There are many other features WordPress can offer. For businesses, WordPress is a very robust CMS platform that will allow you much more flexibility and administrative control over your content, while giving you the added benefit of SEO-friendliness. You don’t have to know HTML or CSS to use a WordPress website or blog and WordPress offers a built in editor, pre-existing customizations, and helpful tutorials. Although WordPress may not be the most perfect CMS solution, it’s so easy to set up, run, and maintain a great website that will deliver great search engine results.

By: Susan McCrossin

About the Author:

Some people I know thought that using WordPress is complicated that they settle not to use WordPress for their blogs. Well, these people must see the different variety of innovation stored for them.

Since the WordPress community understands the dilemma of most bloggers, they have come up with solutions that benefit all the WordPress users. One example is the use of WordPress widget. These widget collections enable the users to customize their site without having to go through the coding process. All they need to do is drag a certain widget from the widget area and drop it to the sidebar target content. Easy right?

How do we do that then? I’ll show you how.

In any default WordPress theme, you find on the sidebar (located on the right portion of the site) the different components. Each of those component such as Pages, Archives, Categories, Blogroll and Meta are made up of widgets.

What are WordPress Widgets?
Widgets are plugins which has different functions that are useful for putting content on your site without having to go through the coding process.

Since each of these widgets are uniquely designed for its function, it’s best to learn about some of the common widgets usually used for sites before applying widgets into your WordPress blog.

How to manage WordPress Widgets?
Here I show you step by step of managing widgets below.

First of all, login to your WordPress admin page.

Once you are in the admin area, find the “Appearance” button located at the left portion of your admin page.

Click on the “Appearance” Button. In the “Appearance” page, it shows the theme you are currently using as well as the different themes you can choose from. In your current default theme, notice the different options that your theme is built of. This information is helpful in choosing your theme. Since it is crucial for your site to function well, make sure that the theme you choose for your blog site is has a block enabled for widget. Click on the “Widget” Submenu Button. Under the “Appearance” menu, you would find different submenu. Once you click on the “Widgets” button the widgets interface appears showing the available widgets in the widget area. Each widgets has its own function, you can choose any of these widgets depending on what your site needs. All you have to do is drag a certain widget from the widget area to the target sidebar and drop it to where you want it to appear.

Once your widgets are settled on your target sidebar, it is expected to function accordingly.

How to work with Plugins with Widgets?
If you think you need more widgets and you can’t seem to find the kind of widget you think would suit your site in the widget area, all you need to do is to search for new widgets.

To do so:

Click on the “Plugins” menu located at the left portion of your admin right under the “Appearance” menu. Then on the submenu under the “Plugins”, click on the “Add New” link.

An interface of “Install Plugin” shall appear. There are two options to search for widgets. The first one is to key in the keyword in the plugin search section or to click on the available tags in the plugin directory. Since we are looking for widget we are to click for widget tag.

Whether you chose either options the result would reveal different widgets to choose from which you think can be useful to your site.

Supposed you have already chosen a certain widget for your site, all you need to do is to click on the “Install” link located at the upper right corner of a searched widget plugin just below the “Action” category.

Clicking the install action shall reveal the plugin info page.

The images above show the full description of the chosen plugin and contains all the information and different features of the widget and as to whether the plugin is compatible with your version of WordPress or not. Supposed you found a certain plugin, click on the “Install Now” button located at the upper right corner of the pop-up window.

Once installed, activate the said plugin. This automatically put the activated widget to list of activated plugins.

Now that we have installed and activated the widget, go back to the “Widget” area, where you can find the preinstalled widgets, notice that the newly installed and activated widget is already included in the available widget area. Again, to add the widget into your site, drag and drop the widget into your target sidebar.

After doing all the process, all you need to do now, is visit your site and see the changes. Now who said that WordPress is complicated?

Next, you need a WordPress theme to put the widgets into action. Search for top quality free and premium WordPress themes at ThemeGrade.com

By: Brian L.

About the Author:

I have been creating websites since 1999. I remember back when I was working at Compaq as the Portable Division Manager, the first reference book my corporate training team used was found at our local grocery store. We affectionately called it “the Kroger Bible”.

At the time we were searching for another more efficient way to create online training and I believed we needed to move from a proprietary system that depended upon one person’s expertise to a more universal development tool. That tool was HTML. This was a huge step of faith since our training materials reached over 300,000 people globally in our new product introductions. And changing development tools was considered risky.

Before my supervisor, who was the top Marketing leader in our division, would agree to the re-tolling, we needed to prove our theory in practice. I remember the day when I asked two training developers to take our new ideas and use a HTML creation tool. They were expected to give a report on their findings and demonstrate how much of a product they could produce in a week’s time. I left them alone with the Kroger bible, to work without micromanaging. The results were outstanding. Not only did they create an entire training course, they actually re-wrote it a couple times to make it even better. They found learning HTML code was easy when adding content to a pre-made template.

From these initial great results, I considered HTML to be the premier website coding tool. As my team became more proficient with Dreamweaver, an HTML coding tool, our training websites became more powerful.

My career took a turn and I joined an insurance company as a special projects ecommerce director in 2000. And then my life changed when I was introduced to a Content Management System (CMS) website development tool. This new tool, Flypaper was very different since it was a server-side tool that you used online to create webpage content. But I found the experience to be liberating as a non-programmer suddenly was adding applications to pages without the need of a programmer writing heavy code. I left my corporate job in 2001 and with it, reality hit. When Flypaper technology went by the wayside, I was faced with creating my own website using HTML again, except this time I had to learn the code and make it work.

After spending 25+ years in the training profession, I was determined to repurpose my online training company into an internet marketing organization. Along with that meant I needed to be able to create search engine friendly websites quickly. By 2005 I had located some advanced HTML editors that allowed me to work without having to write code, but these websites were just not as web-savvy as they needed to be. At an Internet conference, I was introduced to WordPress, first as a blog and then as a regular static website. I found WordPress to be everything I wanted it to be and even more.

After going through about five online hosting systems, I finally found one of the premiere WordPress hosting services to relocate my 50+ website domains. Then I started looking for just the right templates to use to start porting my HTML sites into search-engine friendly internet marketing machines. I decided to choose three templates and get very familiar with them so I could quickly generate a new website. I have become so efficient now that I can get a new website up and running, add custom webpages, keyword rich posts and pages, and custom forms like polls, contact us or order forms and be fully functional in search engines within a couple hours. Of course then I enjoy tweaking the content (text, audio, video, keywords) to make it even better.

Making the switch to WordPress blogs was a great decision. I now am able to create powerful websites for my clients that help them grow their businesses. When asked what type of websites I recommend… I recommend WordPress. Oh… did I mention that the templates I use are free? That makes me even more competitive when potential clients are cost conscious. And for these many reasons, that is why I changed all of my websites from HTML to WordPress.

By: V. Karen Miller

About the Author:

There are millions of WordPress blogs on the internet, but the majority of them are not optimized for the search engines. This article explains 7 ways that you can make your WordPress blog more search engine friendly.

1. Make sure that your permalinks are set up optimally for SEO – whenever you publish a blog post it will have a permanent URL known as a “permalink”. By default the WordPress permalink setting is not optimal but you can easily edit this by clicking on the Settings->Permalinks menu in the WordPress dashboard and then use a custom setting such as yourdomainname.com/category/postname. This will mean that your blog post category and title will appear in the URL rather than a number.

2. Install the All in One SEO Pack (or a another similar plugin) – the All in One SEO Pack plugin allows you to add a custom title, meta description and keyword tags for your home page and blog posts.

3. Optimize each blog post for a low competition long tail keyword phrase – before you make a blog post take some time to do a little keyword research. Visit the Google AdWords Keyword tool and use this to find a long tail keyword phrase that has a low amount of competition. Ideally this phrase will have just a few hundred monthly searches rather than a few thousand monthly searches. Use a different keyword phrase for every blog post that you make and put the keyword phrase in the blog post title and 2-3 times throughout the post.

4. Use Social Bookmarking services to bookmark each blog post – whenever you post to your blog use a social bookmarking service e.g. Digg or StumbleUpon. There are also services such as OnlyWire and SocialMarker that will let you submit your site to multiple bookmarking services at the same time. Social bookmarking can get you additional traffic to your blog and give you a backlink to your blog post.

5. Optimize the home page of your blog – it is normal for the home page of your blog to get more traffic then any of the other pages. You can increase the number of visitors even more by optimizing your home page. Pick 1-2 keyword phrases for your home page using a keyword research tool such as the Google AdWords keyword tool and choose one or two phrases that are related to your niche. Ideally these phrases should get a few thousand searches per month and the competition shouldn’t be too tough. Ensure that you include these keyword phrases are mentioned in the TITLE tag, meta description and throughout the permanent content of your blog home page.

6. Install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin – this won’t increase your search engine rank, but having a sitemap will help to ensure that the search engines index all the posts and pages of your blog. You can use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create a sitemap for your blog.

7.Build links to your blog – building links back to your website is the surest way to improve your ranking in the search engines. If you ignore this it will be very difficult to get a good level of visitors from the search engines. You can build links using article marketing, directory submission, forum posting, commenting on other blogs, press releases, link exchange and social bookmarking.

For more tips on how to improve your search engine rank visit Suzanne Morrison’s website http://www.3StepsToSearchEngineSuccess.com

By: Suzanne Morrison

About the Author: